Ancient Narrative, Volume 11, preliminary version Persuasion, Emotion, and the Letters of the Alexander Romance J ACQUELINE A RTHUR -MONTAGNE Stanford University Mixture is the letter, the epistle which is not a genre, but all genres, literature itself. Jacques Derrida, The Postcard (48) The presence of over thirty letters embedded in the Greek Alexander Romance has garnered frequent attention from scholars of epistolography, novels, and fiction. 1 These letters are widely distributed throughout the three books of the Romance, attributed to various characters in the plot. What is most striking about the deployment of letters in the narrative is the mixture of different epis- tolographical types. From battle briefs, boastful barbarian epistles, and lengthy letters of marvels, it is clear that the epistolary frame here operates in very different capacities. I know of no other work of ancient fiction that in- corporates so many different epistolary forms. If it is fair to regard epistolog- raphy as a spectrum of genres, 2 then the Alexander Romance spans the full register from functional to philosophical. Sorting the sources and interrelationships of these letters has been a chal- lenge for critics, further complicated by the tangled transmission history and the multiple recensions of the Alexander Romance. Reinhold Merkelbach’s seminal study in 1954 made a crucial and intuitive distinction between the lengthy ‘Wunderbriefe’ and the novel’s shorter letters: he claimed that the lat- ter category represents the remnants of a lost epistolary novel about the life of ————— 1 Hägg 1983, 126 regards the incorporation of letters as the ‘most important innovation’ on the part of the author. For the most recent treatments, see Konstan 1998, Rosenmeyer 2001 (ch. 7), and Whitmarsh 2013 (ch. 6). 2 See the introduction of Morello and Morrison 2007, 13: ‘Rather than attempting to con- struct a more generous (or a more watertight) definition of the letter…we could think of this genre as a kind of spectrum.’